Credit: The Associated Press

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, left, with his attorney, Jeffrey Denner, right, during the opening statements in his trial, in Los Angeles Criminal Court Building Monday, March 18, 2013.

LOS ANGELES — Testimony in the murder trial of a notorious Rockefeller impostor opened Tuesday with a witness telling how his excavation for a pool turned creepy when he discovered a human skull and a bag of bones.

"We were all kind of freaked out," said Jose Perez, a heavy equipment operator who was digging for a pool in suburban San Marino in 1994 when he and his father discovered the human remains. They called police.

It had been a decade since Christian Gerhartsreiter, known to his San Marino neighbors as Chris Chichester, had disappeared.